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April 17th 2009
I was listening to a famous neurosurgeon being interviewed on TV. He was explaining to the interviewer that our speech centre rules over all of our nerves. What we say with words is directly reflected in our thoughts and our actions. Our bodies involuntarily respond to the power inherent in our words.
Years ago an interesting study was developed called psycho-cybernetics. The study came out of research that was done after World War I. A plastic surgeon, Maxwell Malz, was doing facial reconstruction on men who had been disfigured by explosions during the war. Their findings were that many of the men who’d had their faces restored to almost new, still cowardly hid or were embarrassed when they stood and talked with others. Dr. Malz and his colleagues discovered that what was on the outside did not matter nearly as much as what was on the inside—the way the men perceived themselves.
Psycho-cybernetics comes from two words. Psycho means the mind and cybernetics comes from a word which means helmsman or steersman of a ship. The study is of how the mind steers our behaviour.
As I thought about our behaviour being steered by our thinking, my thoughts went to the words of James, the brother of Jesus. He wrote, “Look at the ships, though they are so great and are driven by strong winds, are still directed by a very small rudder wherever the inclination of the pilot desires.” James and Maxwell Malz agree. The boat’s behaviour is a result of a very small influencer—the rudder. What steers our bodies?
A very simple illustration happened this week in my office. A friend of mine had a small stone in one of his saliva glands. Like a kidney stone or gallstone, he described the excruciating pain that he experienced every time he even thought about food. He said, “As soon as I think about eating, my saliva gland starts to salivate and the stone rips further through my cheek!” What amazed me was that as soon as he spoke that sentence, he yelled out in pain. His words were the rudder to which his glands were responding.
It was an aha! moment for me. I saw again in the demonstration before me how powerfully our words prophetically foretell our circumstances. What happens in us, and ultimately to us, has a great deal to do with how we speak.
The conclusion of proponents or psycho-cybernetics is for us to keep positively speaking what we want to have happen. We can retrain our behaviour by retraining our mind with our words. If I wanted to stop smoking I might repeat over and over, “Smoking makes me sick. I hate the taste of smoke.” Or if I want to sleep at night, I’d repeat, “My body is very tired, I will sleep peacefully tonight.” The belief is that as I alter the course of my rudder (of speech) my ship (of life direction) will turn. It’s a sound principle.
- Barry Buzza
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